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1 – Plan the Trip Around Your Children
While this probably seems obvious and makes sense, a lot of people first-timing it with childrenn forget that the trip needs to be planned around them. If they have fun, you have fun (and you can still sneak in your own wants too). More info in further tips…

2 – Prepare Your Children
Before going, make sure your kids are familiar with the characters they will meet at Disney. If they haven’t experienced a parade, fireworks or other loud shows, determine if you think they’ll be able to handle it before getting a front row seat to Fantasmic or Festival of Fantasy. YouTube has thousands of videos of the attractions, fireworkds, character interactions, restaurants, etc. that can be great to familiarize your children with unfamiliar aspects of the trip. Disney also has a free Trip-Planning DVD available on their website.

3 – You Will Not Be Able To Do Everything
Know before you go that you will not be able to do everything. Some shows may be too late, too long, too intense or too busy.

4 – Your Child’s Schedule Comes First
You know your child better than anyone else. Are they more energetic in the mornings or afternoons? Are they a napper? Can they fall asleep in a stroller? ADRs (Advanced Dining Reservations) are great, and can help you pick the best meal times.

5 – Strollers? Yes!
Definitely use one. Little legs will get tired quickly walking around parks, and carrying your child can get very tiring. Commercial airlines will gate-check your stroller if you’re flying to Orlando. If you are driving and space is limited, renting may make more sense.
At the parks, there are stroller parking areas that can get full, and Disney will move strollers around as people come and go, so make sure yours is clearly labeled to make it easy to find.
Use the parking: you can leave your stroller at the carousel, for example, and go to it’s a small world, Peter Pan’s Flight, Mickey’s Philharmagic, 7 Dwarfs Mine Train, etc without having to move it.

6 – Keep Your First Trip Memorable
If you are only going once, wait until your children are old enough to enjoy and appreciate it. If you plan to go multiple times, this is not as important, but you’ll want to make sure your kids are at an age that they’ll have a good time (and you will too).

7 – Picking a Resort – Options for Kids
There are many activities for kids of all ages at the different hotels. Some have better pools, some have more activities (Fort Wilderness Lodge has trails, bikes, horses, archery), some have better food options and others have various daily activities (Animal Kingdom has animals to see). If you’re unfamiliar with the Walt Disney World resorts, do your research beforehand. In general, the value and moderate resorts are more geared toward children, but the deluxe resorts can also be fun.

8 – ADRs (Advanced Dining Reservations)
When making these, you need to include your kids in the numbers, it is based on how many seats you’ll be taking, not how many people will be eating. Every restaurant has foods for kids, but it’ll be up to you to determine which places would work well foodwise, pricewise, and entertainment wise for your family.

what additional tips do you want to share? Please leave them in the comments below!

NOTE: This post was started some time in the past, and recently appeared as unpublished….

For the last week, I’ve been posting a question on my twitter account (@365DaysOfDisney): if you were to create a Frozen attraction at Walt Disney World, what would you do? If YOU have an idea, please leave a comment on this post!

Frozerail

Princess Cami ‏@ADream_IsAWish – Olaf slip and slide ride. Like on his belly. Smaller. More for kids. Barnstormers but longer and cuter. I have a whole frozen expansion set up in my head for MK. It’s pretty pathetic.

Steve Duane ‏@duaneste – Re-theme Tike’s Peak at Blizzard Beach into Olaf’s snowman-in-summer gag and then let us never speak of Frozen again.

Brian Husted ‏@detsuh maybe they could replace Disco Yeti with Marshmallow? OR a stage show that explains relation between Frozen’s Elsa and Incredibles’ Frozone… cousins?

MouseChow ‏@MouseChowOld school “Himalaya” type bobsled ride! Complete with DJ playing dance mixes of Let It Go and Love is an Open Door.The place it would really fit would be the Boardwalk. Wouldn’t it be cool to have an attraction there? get rid of the dance club at the end… And create a outside dance club. Can’t you just picture the strings of lights? And an outdoor bar.Over the water would be so cool! There was a dance club at the boardwalk near me that was over water at high tide.

Currently, Disney has rethemed the Maelstrom Ride into Frozen Ever After, which has proven incredibly popular with Frozen fans. But, if YOU could add a Frozen attraction anywhere at Walt Disney World, what would it be, and where would you put it? Leave a comment below!

I’ve had a lot of people ask me this question… They’re going to Walt Disney World for a certain amount of time, and are wondering if they should spend the money on an annual pass instead of whatever ticket they were going to get.

For most visitors to Walt Disney World (who aren’t from Florida or DVC members), a Disney Platinum Pass is going to cost you $779. (as of posting this: May 1st, 2017)

If you are going to WDW for one week, a park hopper ticket (allowing you to go to multiple parks per day) is $485. So when you compare the two, it’s about $300 more to get the annual pass. Why would a person pay that much more money for one? Well, there are some reasons, which when put together, may make sense.

1 – You think you may come back within 12 months. If you’re going to come back for 3 or more days ($349), the annual pass is worth it. So if you take a trip about every year or so, plan your trips accordingly. One year, go August 15-22. The next year, go August 7-14. You get two trips out of one annual pass. It pays for itself and saves you plenty of money.
2 – You brought your own car and you’re staying off property. Parking costs $20 a day at Walt Disney World, so a week of driving in will be an extra $140. The Disney Platinum Pass gives you free parking for the entire year.
3 – You love the Photopass pictures and on-ride pictures at the parks. You can pay $149 for Memory Maker, unlimited photos during your stay. The Disney Platinum Pass gives you free photos for the entire year.
4 – You do a lot of dining or shopping, or have a large group that will spend a good amount of money on food and souvenirs. The Disney Platinum Pass gives you a discount of 10-20% off at a good number of restaurants, and 20% at a LOT of merchandise locations.
5 – You’re thinking of doing a tour or sports recreations at Walt Disney World. The Disney Platinum Pass gives you a discount of 15% on many tours, including Behind the Seeds, Keys to the Kingdom, and on mini-golfing, spas and other recreations.
6 – If you’re planning on staying onsite at a Walt Disney World resort, having an annual pass can save you quite a lot on your resort room. Staying for only 2 nights, depending on the season and resort, can make the Disney Platinum Pass worth it, and staying for even longer can save you hundreds of dollars.

When planning your vacation, any combination of these may show you that getting an annual pass is worth the extra money. If you’re planning on buying Memory Maker, playing a few rounds of miniature golf, and spending money on parking while at Walt Disney World, the Disney Platinum Pass is definitely worth it!

The money you can save by purchasing an annual pass can be hundreds of dollars or more! And that saved money means a longer trip, more souvenirs, a character buffet, or a donation to 365DaysAtDisney (joking. sort of…).

(And who doesn’t want this awesome looking card in their wallet?!?)

Please be sure to follow me on twitter, where I tweet daily about Disney history, food, parks, movies, and more! @365DaysOfDisney

The Haunted Mansion Halloween event will be a seasonal dinner show offered in the months of September and October. On each night of Mickey’s Not-So-Scary Halloween Party (32 nights), there will be a separately ticketed dinner show available in the Magic Kingdom.

Guests will receive an invitation to attend the wedding of Constance Hatchaway and her fiancé, which will change each week to encourage more merchandise opportunities. Having different would-be husbands also adds to the repeatability factor of the event. Guests will want to see how each wedding changes from week to week in their themes, the music, dancing, food, etc.

The dinner itself will take place in a ballroom, set up as closely as possible to Disney’s ballroom from the Haunted Mansion, that is built adjacent to the current ride building, so guests truly feel like they are walking into the attraction. Live actors will perform music, dance for the dining guests in period costumes, and after the food has been collected, will encourage guests to come up onstage (on the ballroom floor) and interact with them. Two actors will even reenact the duel from the paintings above the ballroom.

Of course, this was all a dream, but Disney Imagineers, if you decide to add this to the Magic Kingdom, give me a call and I’ll let you know more details. 🙂

Over the past few weeks and months, my family has made the decision to buy in to the Disney Vacation Club. We have purchased 150 points at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort.

What is Disney Vacation Club?

Disney Vacation Club, or DVC, is a timeshare. People have a negative attitude about the term “timeshare” though, so Disney calls it a vacation club, which definitely sounds much nicer. When you buy points, your points can be used at any Disney Vacation Club resort. You pick when you want to go, what type of room you want to stay in, and what type of a view you’d like.

Why buy Disney Vacation Club?

We looked at how many times we’ve been to Walt Disney World in the past 10 years (nine times!), and how much we’d spent on lodging for each of those vacations. We know that in the future, we’d like to keep going every other year or more, and because of that, Disney Vacation Club makes sense.

What are the REAL costs?

Disney is selling point at the Polynesian Village Resort (Walt Disney World) and at Aulani (in Hawaii). Points are currently $168 each. Meaning, if you buy in at 150 points, you’ll be paying $25,200. If you have the cash up front, you end up getting each year’s vacation for about $500, plus the annual dues of $900. $1,400 a year might sound like a lot, but when you know that it’s for a week at a deluxe resort, for just about the cost of a value, that’s pretty great.

Now, if you decide to pay over 10 years with Disney financing, you end up paying 12.5% interest, so an extra $15,000. TIP: PAY IT OFF AS QUICKLY AS YOU CAN!

What does that mean, though?

The cost per point, over 50 years, ends up being about $9.40 each. Staying at a deluxe studio at the Animal Kingdom for a week in January would cost 68 points, or about $640 dollars. A two bedroom suite in January is as low as 185 points, or about $1,740. Pretty great considering 9 people can stay there and it includes a living room, dining, full kitchen, and washer and dryer.

A lot of people in the past week have been talking about the Powerball lottery, which had a jackpot of $900,000,000 and was then raised to around $1,500,000,000 (yes, that’s 1.5 billion!) Because many people have been talking about it, I decided to bring a few questions to my Twitter account (365DaysOfDisney).

This week on Twitter, I asked the following question: If you were to win a few million dollars (or more) in the lottery, how would you spend it at the Disney parks? I received a number of really interesting and differing responses, some of them using the hashtag “DisneyPowerball”.

Some of your responses
Most followers said that they’d want to purchase either a home in Golden Oak, Disney’s million dollar neighborhood, or Disney Vacation Club points. So I did some research.

Golden Oak currently has four homes available for purchase, ranging from $1,899,000 to $2,999,000, or if you don’t mind waiting, you can build your own custom Disney home. Golden Oak has four neighborhoods: Marceline, Carolwood, Silverbrook and Kimball Terrace. There are special perks to living there, like having a concierge able to book travel, tee times, dining reservations, and even in-home catered events.

The Disney Vacation Club is Disney’s worst “Best-Kept Secret”: everyone seems to know about it. Many potential Powerball winners would like to own points for the time share. When I contacted a DVC specialist this evening, I found that Disney has limited the amount of points you can own at any one resort to 4,000, and a grand total of 9,000 in all of the resorts. With banking, a person could use 12,000 points every three years at one resort, and Disney doesn’t want anyone to be able to monopolize the resorts. That being said, 4,000 points at Disney’s Polynesian Village Resort would cost $672,000 (plus closing costs), and have annual dues of $24,320. Of course, if you have millions of dollars, that’s not too bad.

Once in Orlando, a lot of respondents said they’d love to take the backstage Disney tours, eat at whatever restaurants they wanted without worrying about the cost (Victoria and Albert’s, anyone?), and buy any souvenirs they want.

Give Kids The World also had some responses, with a few people saying that they’d love to give millions to the non-profit organization that helps “fulfill the wishes of children with life-threatening illnesses”. Give Kids The World is located a short distance from Disney and does amazing things for kids and their families, giving them a place to stay, food, trips to the parks, in-resort entertainment, etc. (you can follow them on Twitter here)

My response
If I were to win millions of dollars, I would definitely spend a good amount at Walt Disney World. My ultimate dream is to spend 365 consecutive days at Walt Disney World. With a local apartment and conservative financial choices, I’ve priced this out at around $42,000. But if I had lots of money? I’d buy a house nearby, and on weekends, try different Disney resorts out. Royal Asante Presidential Suite at Animal Kingdom? Don’t mind if I do. Doing every behind-the-scenes tour? Sounds great! Rent a yacht for the fireworks and have a private dinner on-board? Sign me up!

I also asked one other question: If the Disney parks were to offer a Disney lottery, which had prizes like one night in the castle, a week’s vacation, unlimited fastpasses, a signature dining package, Disney gift cards, etc, would you buy tickets? Disney had their “Year Of A Million Dreams”, which gave out prizes, but would you be willing to pay for a chance to win something special? A lot of people said yes. Although Disney’s prices have gone up and up and up, people are still willing to spend a few extra dollars if they have a chance to win something incredible.

So, how would you spend your money at Walt Disney World if you had millions? Leave your response in the comments below!